60 comments:

HMRC have no regard for personal data law - THEY ARE ABOVE THE LAW, PERIOD!I made a Subject Access Request to HMRC and they unlawfully disclosed personal data relating to third parties. I gave them ever opportunity to rectify the issues but the failed to do so.

Fair play Ken. Do feel free to copy in the House of Lords to your reply from the HMRCesspit. Or, let them know you have asked for a FOI request and the subject matter to make them aware of it in the first instance.

With any luck, it could be a catalyst for the ExCom idiots to hauled before a Public Accounts Committee. Again.

Hundreds of people in HMRC Wrexham office and across Counter Avoidance where the EBT files were supposed to be sent to know this. Some real tasty details lost. Not just personal details but income, interviews, case histories, the lot. The stuff lost was terrible.

And guess who was in charge? Nellthorp in designing the transfer process, Simpson the Channel where the cases were supposed to go and David Richardson the director. The Digital Evidence Capability (system) that blew £43 million down the drain before being cancelled without trace (You raised an FoI about that Ken and got stonewalled by reason of commercial interests) was supposed to manage the transfer of these and other cases. Didn't manage it and shit loads of highly sensitive avoidance case files got lost. Local office colleagues. How much in revenue was lost by these being ripped from You and disappearing into an unworked void?

I recall the two child benefit data discs going missing, never arriving at the NAO. Paul Gray resigned quickly by today's standards. But HMRC couldn't cover it up as NAO blew the whistle.

Clearly subsequent serious data losses, post the 2007 failure, should have been treated with utmost scrutiny by the ICO. One wonders if this loss of EBT data was reported to the ICO. Accountability (principle 7 of data protection) would demand those in charge to face disciplinary action for obvious failings in the design of this transfer project.

My guess, is that by this time folk had been promoted beyond their ability by Nellthorp and weren't up to the job. Another opportunity lost to get rid of Nellthorp et all. Breathtaking arrogance by SLT. Whose call was it, Jenny Granger or Lin Homer?

You're assuming these cases were on Caseflow or CQI to begin with. In my experience with certain areas of Compliance, teams have decided not to record cases "digitally' as the available systems are too time consuming. It causes no end of problems (apart from the loss of paper data) as multiple enquiries can be running simultaneously without reference to one another. I've lost count of the number of cases that have been opened only to find an enquiry is already working elsewhere.

There's absolutely no cohesion in Compliance when it comes to record keeping standards and when things go wrong it gets swept under the rather lumpy HMRC carpet.

I find it odd that this large cache of EBT records were "lost". Stuff like this brings out the conspiracy theorist in me.

Manipulating data by not recording it, but surely Lean experienced and trained QA/QC would have unearthed this by now?Oh yes, I see now!But what is the ultimate digital department doing using paper data when they have spent billions of 'customers' money on modernising systems, hardware, software, training and consultancy fees?Nah, nothing to see here, the spotlight of the NAO will soon shine upon it. ROFLAnd don't forget, those mobile shredding lorries cost money you know, along with the large office shredders.YCNMTSU

This whole things stinks and it doesn't add up at face value. Especially with the names mentioned in the comment section. Joining the dots paints a very nasty picture.

Let's say there are Perpetrator and Enablers. If you or me went an robbed a bank, it's possible I could get away with it once. Do it twice or third time, expect to get caught. If you were to commit crime repeatedly I would need an enabler. Enablers could stop an investigation, made sure it didn't go anywhere or just cover it up.

If the Perp were in a position of power and information was held on Enablers that would put them at risk of investigation. The Perp would be doing themselves a huge favour by making such information disappear. The Enablers would be very happy with the Perp. The Perp might be even more confident that they could commit future crimes knowing the could get away with it, as the Enablers would see to it for doing such a sterling job of making information disappear. Just a thought.

Wrexham is closing shortly. Dead Men tell no tales. Wipes the slate clean doesn't it. Very, very bad things have happened in the Wrexham area, a reopened investigation is in the news this week.

At least in hell you would expect lying, swearing, bullying, discrimination and harrassment along with everything else!Doubt that Old Nick needs to manipulate statistics, use lean or pacesetter and QA/QC is not utilised.Excom usually agree to the Faustian Deals I believe?There is a special place for these bast@8ds in hell I believe.

And day and daily internal HMRC intranet spouts it nauseating propaganda...this week it's "Apprentice Awards Week"....the new bright young things with their brown noses and tongues gushing about how fucking brilliant the HMRC is,getting their photos taken and receiving a meaningless award.. pathetic sheep who have no integrity or shame......and management love these whores.Wait until these assholes realise that management are just using them and they will be cast aside as quick as they prostituted themselves.On top of that then they will find out the pay progressing they were promised was a lie and for the foreseeable future they will get 1% pay "rise".PCS have emailed us to say that management have offered us 1%...but possibly higher only if we give up some terms and conditions.Despicable bastards.

Look at HMRC's Twitter feed. These apprentices are either telling lies or utterly deluded. Not one mention of how certain bullying, bigoted staff run riot causing untold harm to their colleagues through deliberately bitter and violent acts. These scumbags should be prosecuted. And those like Mr Barker in Hr should be investigated for their parts in covering up unlawful misconduct.

I Work for Counter Avoidance on these EBT and EFURB schemes. So many cases got lost at the time we had little to do and ended up sourcing our own cases. Also, the paper case files that did turn up had loads of bits missing with no trace of where the missing bits had gone. In an age of electronic document management Those twat resorted to sending millions of pieces of paper.... A lot of which vanished.

Mary. I cannot stop you stonewalling this FoI. However if you decide to answer and lie I will open a cache of emails I have from 2014 and prove You a liar in the press and to the police. Lying or misleading in an answer to an FoI is criminal. Please, please do not do that or do not put Your name to an answer You are not 100% on.

Mary. Please do take honesty seriously. If you want a hint of what is waiting in documents held ask Simpson or an EBT Channel lead for the 2014 story about the inspector with 100's of EBT Case files in his garage at home as he knew they were going to be lost or destroyed.... The story is well known in CA.

Unfortunately, HMRC would rather use anti-terrorism law to flush out the Inspector who rescued the EBT cases by taking them off site and storing them in a garage (they must have been desperate). HMRC are not interested in the systematic deliberate destruction of EBT records, no matter how nefarious, it was an SLT operation. No, the poor schmuck who tried to do the right thing will be hunted down as per Osita Mba's case. When the Parliamentary Select Committee stressed the need to protect whistleblowers like Osita, Lin Homer wouldn't give the Committee a guarantee that anti-terrorism powers would never be used again against staff. That case tells all employees of HMRC what they need to know about this employer.

What on earth was so controversial that so many records had to be disappeared? Does anyone know?

BTW, Mary Aiston is currently heading up CAD. NB that Mary was honoured as a Companion of the Order of the Bath in 2017. That's quite a gong!

Ironically also the Director in charge of the security project set up after the CB disc loss (which turned into yet another consultancy gravy-train). Although judging from these recent posts, doesn't seem to have had the desired effect.

Well, you can't say that lessons haven't been learned after the Child Benefit disc loss. One of the lessons clearly being: Don't go public with a cock-up and hopefully it will all blow over before anybody notices.

Chalk up another fine success under Dame Disaster's watch. I'm sure she'll be doing 'the decent thing' in due course.

Wow, beginning to make Pandora's Box and the Cess Pit hand grenadeeffluvium look like a walk in the park!Not sure who Mary is but hope she has a good solicitor by the look of things.There is no smoke without fire and an awful lot of smoke is drifting about.Hope the stuff min the guys garage is secure or copied as it might not have a long shelf life now the 'secret' is out!Could get nasty.

No need for a good solicitor. HMRC are corrupt. The powers that be make sure that allegations of misconduct go nowhere if the perpetrators' face fits. Even the involvement of MPs is disregarded by this law-breaking organisation. From top to toe utterly and shamefully corrupt. (Btw - I am an ex-staff member and survivor of serious bullying which was exacerbated by a series of cover ups all in the knowledge of Thompson. I was left suicidal while they were rewarded for their law-breaking. All the info is out there about the sheer scale of the problem if only someone could join up the dots ffs).

Yes the poor sod took the files home to stop them getting 'lost'. Long since retired. Think he may still have them. This demonstrated the ineptitude of the file transfer process and carnage that went with it. Nellthorp, Richardson and Simpson were repeatedly warned at the time what was happening. Didn't care. I don't doubt that the new regime will deny this. Problem is there is a shit load of audit trail on HMRC Systems as well. 8 Year retention policy on this folks. Difficult as hell to expunge it.

Be in no doubt that the ability to access private data, source data, source any social media and or manipulate exists.As to who orders it and who undertakes it, do your own open source research or just read this thread for an inkling.The good thing is if the SHTF in a big way, this ability to do electronic magic works both ways and footprints are left everywhere.The retired inspector would do well to seek legal opinion and help.Crowd funding exists if sought, but I guess this is going to get messy swiftly, as if it already hasn't.What a state of affairs for what should be a flagship and respected organisation.

As the above poster says look up tor Browser for Your PC and equivalent in Play Store for Your Mobile. Hide Your identitityalmost flawlessly when used properly. Whistleblow for the public good with impunity.

Why not copy the salient parts of this site to every MP, all the press/media, and every other relevant organisation (E.G ECHR) to give it maximum coverage. Do it by email, click of a button.Maybe send it once a week.Maybe, just maybe, it might penetrate the Establishment corruption wall, and bring down this abhorrent house of cards.It is possible there could be one principled person in the Establishment who isn't a self serving crony and who cares about this country.

Reading this thread there is a lack of original material. The points described are not exactly unknown across a lot of staff. However, in the spirit of spicing it up, Penny, Mary and Chris. How about the 2015 data loss? 200 letters sent from the Contractor Loans Channel to scheme users - lot of very sensitive information on each user - were all sent to the sane agent of one sceme user. i.e. A tax agent got 199 extremely sensitive letters not intended for him giving punters scheme details. Very basic error in mail merge with an untrained AO using the software and the same address on 200 letters did not get spotted as there was no procedure in place for issue or checking of these letters. The AO got hung out to dry. Mr Richardson, Nellthorp, the Channel Lead and Simpson hushed it up.

The funny aspect of it was the reaction of the tax agent getting the multitude of letters. Err. This was quite well hushed up, but I feel really sorry for the AO who got a hammering for working with no training and no process...

Yeah, well as I said previously, obviously the mucho spondoolies spent on LEAN/whateverthefuck have ensured that QA/QC works well, hmmm, whatever happened to TRIAGE I wonder?It looks as though the whole debacle of HMRC and lost data shows up the dataprotection legislation as crap, even the latest EU dictat?

Definitely Vicars. Not tarts though they have some morals. I say this as David Richardson used to boast he was a Vicars' son and very active in his local church community in Bedford. Covering for rapists in line with Christian values Davey boy?

And equally interesting. Do You know how the moved him (Richardson) aside when all the Nellthorp allegations started to surface internally? They promoted him from Director to Director General! That is until they realised how serious it was and told him to fuck off and retire. Sterling career Dave. Helped an uncontrolled animal groom and rape. Didn't care did You? The bad owner who cannot control the untrained animal is as culpable as the animal itself.

Honesty, intergrity, impartiality and objectivity are not values upheld by Hmrc management. These scumbags have created an environment of casual corruption, lawbreaking and a tolerance of violent bullying.I am one of many victims (ex staff member) left suicidal and broken by attempts to crush me for standing up to this misconduct, all pathetically covered up by the likes of Barker et al in Hr. These terrible, uneduct, cowards damage people's careers and lives AND the reputation of the Department in the eyes of the public - moreover, their unproductive roles are a drain on vital public money. They are a disgrace to themselves and Hmrc.When will corrupt Hmrc staff be held accountable for their monstrous misconduct? I have my doubts that they ever will; it seems to be that this type of behaviour has gone unchecked for a number of years. Time for a full inquiry?

Gongs for Mongs. With no disrespect intended for any person with genuine learning difficulties.

The awards system has been brought into disrepute caused by a variety of mainly political factors in recent years. Awarding anything to HMRC or its glitterati and evangelical that slither along the management areas merely adds to the already poor image and takes an opportunity from a truly deserving award.

A good exercise for anyone so inclined would be a comparison of HMRC services had they been totally left in public sector domain vs. outsourcing, privatisation, next steps or whatever, but then its only customers money, innit?

HMRC are as bad as the common criminal. Until bullying staff past & present are prosecuted nobody should have any trust in the corrupt Hmrc. (As a former staff member I don't use the word corrupt lightly and for a long time resisted doing so. That was until I experienced management and HR covering up misconduct right through to making deliberately false statements in legal proceedings. That entitles me to conclude that corruption is deeply embedded in HMRC culture. Staff and taxpayers should take note as nobody is fully safe from the HMRC thugs).

And you though politicians were brazen liars when it came to cover-ups or telling the truth?

If this is true and is an example of the measures that HMRC are prepared to adopt wrt 'customers' it must be correctly assumed that the cover-ups on staff issues are as bad, or dare I say it, even worse?

Just watched it raised in HoC to Leadsom.Pretty bland answer in response to a request for an investigation into 6 reported suicides. Also thre in the importance of HMRC addressing tax avoidance.These people are the same idiotsa screwing up Brexit FFS!Their attitude to HMRC obfuscation and lying typifies the contempt they hold for Joe Public, sorry 'customers'!